


Mostly

by ziyazu



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshee Lydia Martin, Canon-Typical Violence, Christmas, F/M, Future Fic, Implied Future Polyamory, M/M, Multi, Nogitsune Side Effects, Open Relationships, Oral Sex, Sex, Stiles Gets A Puppy, Supernatural Assassins For Hire, post-3B
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 09:08:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1773589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziyazu/pseuds/ziyazu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She looks like a debauched angel lying on the crisp hotel sheets when he rolls her off of him, and he loves the way she smiles drowsily to herself in the mirror when she goes to fetch them water. He thinks of lithe, long limbs and sleepy amber-brown eyes sparking with the same expression, and he smiles too, sends Stiles a text to say goodnight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mostly

They don't fool themselves, after so long, that this could ever be something they don't need. He has a husband, so does she, and neither of them is in love here. Still, they don't intend to stop. They work together, after all. Stopping would be, at the very least, deeply inconvenient. And it's not like anyone really minds. Mostly.

Another dazzle of light glints off rich red hair and he finds himself by her side, hand warm on her bare back, palm heavy as he brushes over smooth satin, curling his body around her small frame for a beat to say hello. She turns to him, smiles indulgently, and leans into him for a moment the way old friends do before he straightens, offering her the last of his scotch. She takes it delicately, small fingers quick and clever on the etched crystal, and he watches her savor it until he's pulled away, spun for a quiet conversation, a quick chat, a prying 'catch-up' gilding thinly-veiled animosity with a veneer of politeness. The last job, the next job, the job three weeks ago that nearly went wrong, they heard, but didn't, mmm, how _lucky_ for him, and won't he pass on a message to his husband, just this once? Slimy praise and wolfsbane alcohol and subtle threats couched in the flair of an artfully careless gesture. Why they bother when they all know who he's married to - when they know who _he_ is - is anyone's guess, but they do. It's the annual West Coast harvest party, bringing in the winter months with a semi-sincere truce and a gala to glam up negotiations. Everyone has an angle, and no one here is someone to underestimate.

She lets him go without a glance, but when he sees her later she gives him a pointed nod, and he's glad he got the king-sized bed when he checked into the hotel earlier. He always comes to these things representing Stiles and Stiles would want nothing but the best for Lydia, after all. Besides he owes her, probably. He nearly killed her, once upon a time, for all that they never say a word about the past. They're friends, and they talk, but nogitsunes are too close to his home, and Argents are waiting up at hers.

He wonders sometimes how he should feel about that. Chris isn't Kate, but when he slides into Lydia, when they tangle in sheets on this continent or that, he still feels like he's fucking his enemy's wife. He's not sure what Lydia thinks when he holds her hips, when she moves roughly against him, when her voice goes shrill in the way only a banshee's can. Maybe she just likes the feel of him inside her. It's something they have in common. That's enough. Mostly.

It isn't often. They're both very busy killing people, and she's not a greedy woman, Lydia. Full-grown, her young boundless ego and desperate need to frost herself with perfection is long gone, gnawed at, squeezed off, frayed by endless death. He hears her screams in his head sometimes, over a mountain range or away across another ocean when they're not working together, not paired up as the best of the best, and he always sends her a text, just in case. She only replies when it's someone they know, which isn't often now. There aren't many people left to really care about.

(He wishes he could remember to miss Isaac more. There are too many to remember to miss, now. His own family are just names, except for Laura. He hasn't seen Cora for years.)

 Stiles doesn't try to care about most of the people they know. Not that he has to, or that he has time to. He's the one running things, after all, and it takes its toll. Still, he has Scott, and Kira, and his father. Melissa. It's strange that the person Derek has is Lydia, but it's also fitting, somehow. It's not like Lydia ever needs anything from him but this. Stiles needs so much. They both get what they need, and they're fine with sharing, he thinks. Mostly.

When she opens his hotel room door later that night, keycard wheedled out of an awed desk clerk, he's in stockinged feet, undershirt on over opened dress pants, and she steadies herself with a touch on the doorknob as she toes off her heels.

"I ordered us your favorite smoked salmon," she says. "For the morning."

"Mmmmm," he murmurs, and steps into the warmth of her body, bends to sink his face into her curls. Light little arms twine around his shoulders, and she tilts her chin to brush his jawline. He smells her neck, ignores the scent of Chris, and smiles when he finds Malia alongside it. Coyotes aren't the only ones who tiptoe, but they do it well. He hadn't even sensed his cousin tonight.

Lydia's nails bite gently into his scalp, and he pulls back to nuzzle her nose, nip at her lips. "Missed you." 

She smirks. "So did the omega on the stairs. Incredibly poor form with a bow, Allison would have been appalled."

He blinks at her and she shrugs. "I killed him with my lip gloss."

He laughs.

*

Her breasts are full above him as she moves, full and soft and white in the low lamplight. He tells her she must be an assassin because she's killing him, and she laughs at the bad joke, high and bright and breathless. When he comes it's between her warm thighs, pressed tight to his sides and trembling with pleasure as she puffs on his neck, crumpled to his chest.

She looks like a debauched angel lying on the crisp hotel sheets when he rolls her off of him, and he loves the way she smiles drowsily to herself in the mirror when she goes to fetch them water. He thinks of lithe, long limbs and sleepy amber-brown eyes sparking with the same expression, and he smiles too, sends Stiles a text to say goodnight. She nudges next to him under the covers and he falls sleep to the glow of her phone as she checks her email. Nothing from Chris, as usual. He wonders if that bothers her.

He wakes up only once, when Stiles sends a photo of Scott asleep on the sofa, Cheetos strategically arranged on his slack features.

He loves his husband.

*

 Three weeks later, wiping blood off his face as an early snow falls around them, she kisses his cheek and tells him he's her favorite. He glances around at the fifteen bodies sliced and diced so neatly, clawmarks almost surgical in their precision, and he sighs, covers his ears. She grins up at him, sweetly, and then she screams. He tries not to flinch as the brainsplatter hits him. It's not very assassin-y to flinch.

When he uncovers his ears she's laughing again, and he looks dejectedly around at his pretty kills, headless and gooey now, no good for anything but a bonfire. They'll have to call in a chopper, which Stiles will gripe about. When he works alone he picks up the pieces neatly, spreads new dirt to cover the blood, drops chunks in the deep forest where they'll be eaten quickly. It's an art, and he enjoys it. He's good at it. It feels like composting, somehow. (He's a greenie, sue him.) Lydia, though, she likes the flair, the implosions, skulls crushed and fragmented, eyeballs in the bushes. He doesn't get it. It's messy.

He sighs again, shrugs the echo of her out of his brain, feels a chunk of grey matter slide down his ear and grimaces at the sensation. She picks her way back to their motorbike and giggles along his back the whole way to the rendezvous point. He wonders what went wrong with him that he likes it so much.

*

The one person who doesn't kill for them is Kira. You'd think Scott, but no. Kira. She will if she has to, if they're in danger, but she doesn't get sent out on missions like the rest of them, like the other agents they've found and fostered. He's not sure if she asked Stiles for that or not, but over time she's become their failsafe, their moral compass. She decides right from wrong for them, who they'll agree to kill and why, and then Stiles lays out the plans, organizes the mission, sends the teams. It seems to work. Then again, when they hear one particular rumor, she insists on going, and when they run into a familiar face, hands bloody and eyes cold, Derek grabs and holds and she beheads without hesitating - it's only afterwards that she crumples and cries. When he thinks about it later, it's not that he regrets helping her killing her mother, it's just that he wishes there had been another way. He's glad, though, that she makes those decisions now. He was always terrible at them.

Lydia and Kira are friendly, but they don't really get along. He thinks that's because foxes trick death so often, and death doesn't like tricksters. Neither does he, after the nogitsune, but he must admit his preference for death is mostly because a certain specter of it sometimes wraps herself around him and slowly jerks him off, her juices fresh in his mouth, her breath still coming hard in his ear. He doesn't really prefer her to Stiles, or Stiles to her, at least in this way. When Stiles comes in his mouth he watches his face, watches him fall apart. When Lydia does he grips her hips tighter and keeps on going. She'll smack him if he stops before she's ready, but she always makes it up to him when he least expects it, when he needs it most. Stiles just smooths his hair and whispers to him, pulls him up in their bed, holds him close.

It's sort of the same, in a way.

*

It isn't like Stiles is a taskmaster, especially not when his best agents are his friends and his family, but the world of supernatural kill-evil-for-hire is rough. When Derek gets home from a job, often the only thing he wants to do is to manhandle his husband into the deep-seater bath and soak. Stiles always squawks about the blood filling the water as he combs his fingers through Derek's hair, and Derek always spits water in his face and pokes merciless fingers in his ribs, slides his hands places that have Stiles thrashing and gasping as they rock together.

They usually have to mop the bathroom afterwards. It's a nice way to come home.

He doesn't miss Lydia when he's here. Mostly.

It's not like she misses him, he reminds himself, and she's just across town. He doesn't go there often. Chris and Derek don't really see eye to eye, but aside from the fact that he sleeps with Chris' wife, that's not Derek's fault. Not anymore. Chris was the one who turned them all into hunters, and they're grateful because they're alive - and fucking rich, now - but his code was never Derek's code, and Chris has always had a hard time knowing when to quit. Lydia helps with that, some. When your wife can explode a man's heart in his chest with a single note, you tend to learn tact, but Chris has learned it slowly. Derek likes that she fights on his side more often than not, and if Chris minds that more often than not she ends up in his bed too, Chris can blow him. Well actually, he can't, but his wife sure can.

And she does.

*

There isn't a lot that Derek doesn't know about Stiles, but there was a lot that he didn't get right after the nogitsune. They figured out pretty quickly, though, what a thousand years of abject killing can leave behind in a teenage boy's brain, and he knows now that his Stiles is not the Stiles that he met in the woods that day, not so very long ago. His husband isn't even twenty-five, but he speaks every language they've tried him on so far, and he knows eighty ways to kill someone with a broken chopstick. He taught them every last one when Peter betrayed them again. (It's still weird that that went down at a Panda Express.)

He surprises Derek, though, with how much of him _is_ the old Stiles, padding around in Marvel boxers, flipping one of Allison's old ringknives in his hand, methodically chanting Tibetan verb tenses over the phone to Lydia, who's learning her 23rd language. He can't say vowels properly even in English around the red velvet cupcakes Derek brought him from a job in New York yesterday, but he stuffs one in his mouth mid-sentence anyways, and Derek can hear her yelling at him as he grabs his jacket off the back of a chair. He smirks as Stiles falls onto the sofa rolling his eyes, frosting all over his chin, and leaves them to it. He has Christmas shopping to do.

You'd think she'd be hard, but Lydia is actually incredibly easy to buy for. He learned long ago that as long as it's expensive, she'll love whatever he gives her, but he still lingers over what color, what cut, the setting. Emeralds, he finally decides, the largest ones on offer, and pays with cursed Colombian pesos he maybe should have washed the greenish blood off of first. Deaton hardly minds, though - actually seems pleased - and he compliments the choice of magical acoustics for the earrings. Derek pretends he totally knew they'd amplify Lydia's voice, and turns away with a soft smirk when the vet tacks on a thank you for that troll liver, awhile ago. Nothing like it for feline digestive issues, and he's grateful to have gotten so much.

Yeah, Deaton's still really weird.

As he passes through the lobby of the vet's office, something streaks past his feet with a happy yip, and it turns out shopping for Stiles is easy too. He gets Alan to drop by later that night - no reason to wait a whole week for the actual day - and Stiles is ecstatic. By the time the husky puppy drops off to sleep on their bed in a mess of blankets, his husband is sprawled beside it, elated but drowsy, his fingers deep in her furry little ruff, and Derek has 300 photos of a tiny silver and white blur.

*

Christmas dawns sunny and warm, because he can't for the life of him convince them all to leave California, but at least none of them have any lingering doubts about what the birth of Jesus means for their lives, (they kill supernatural assholes for exorbitant amounts of money; it means jack shit) and they bawdily eat the huge dinner the Sheriff and Melissa make without even a token gesture at the sanctity of the holiday. At one point Scott calls for a toast and Stiles cheerfully stands on the table and holds forth waving around a dismembered vampire hand. Kira hoists her new katana in approval while the Sheriff holds Melissa in his lap, tries to be stern and authoritatian, and instead shakes with laughter. Lydia nearly collapses into the mashed potatoes she's laughing so hard, and Derek pours everyone more wine, because suck it, Jesus.  
  
Chris isn't there, and Derek doesn't ask. Lydia stayed at Scott and Kira's last night, showed up with them this morning somehow both sad and quietly happy, so he hardly needs to. He's sort of known for awhile - there was a whole screaming match that he'd heard from the other side of a bathroom door in Bangkok. By the time everyone heads home in the darkling chill, colored paper a mound by the tree, he's given her a lingering hug and she's squeezed his hand tightly, tighter than he expects.

He forgets sometimes how strong she is. Sometimes it seems like she's just this echoing voice wrapped in everything he can't- he doesn't let himself finish the thought. The lights on the tree twinkle, and all that's left is to make sure the puppy has enough water and to try to dissuade Stiles from taking more than three slices of pie up to bed. (They compromise with five, and the last of the ice cream.)  
  
She knocks on the front door the next morning well before dawn, tired and small in the pooling porchlight, her hand missing its usual ring. He looks at it, and then looks at her, and he lets her in, of course he does, but this... this isn't something they do. Stiles is here. Stiles is... nuzzling the back of his neck, actually, smiling softly and holding out his hand, and this is something he's never even thought about. Um. Mostly.

Derek follows them upstairs, and watches with a kind of awe while his husband hugs Lydia and then kisses her like she's Christmas morning all over again. He watches while Stiles tells her slyly that he likes her earrings, thumbing the green stones while his eyes flick mischievously to Derek, and he watches as Stiles tips her into their bed, her laugh rising high in the pre-dawn darkness.

Maybe it's the magical acoustics, but he shivers as it sweeps across his skin. He settles carefully on the bed, against the headboard, and he swears can feel the trill of it in his bones, deep inside him, like warm, honeyed whiskey in the places he sometimes still feels cold. He reaches out to touch her and she whirls in a coppery mess of joy, her lips meeting his in a blurred, dizzy mash as she clambers over Stiles and cuddles between them sleepily, hair falling loose on her shoulders, leaning into his chest while she smiles up at him, and okay, maybe Derek _is_ a bit in love.  
  
Then again, as Stiles shoves her shirt up and mouths softly at her hip, and she hums happily in Derek's arms, he may have been the only one who needed convincing.


End file.
